Decency, our way

I’m finding it hard to read the latest on our detention centres because I want to avoid feeling sick. Which is a trap: if people who oppose what we’re doing tune out, that’s the end of the struggle, and the end of the refugees’ hopes.

 

Webdiary contributor Brendan wrote today: “Notice the subtle racism and not so subtle vilification in the response of that hero and exemplar of the modern Liberal Party, Phillip Ruddock, to hunger strikes and lip sewing at Woomera: “Lip sewing is a practice unknown in our culture,” he said. “It’s something that offends the sensitivities of Australians. The protesters believe it might influence the way we might respond. It can’t and it won’t.” If it wasn’t a genuine quote, you might think it was something from the blackest of satires on contemporary Australia.”

 

A student interviewed me today for her honours thesis on John Howard’s now abandoned ministerial code of conduct. At the end, she asked whether I thought Ruddock really believed what he was saying?

 

I think he does. If he didn’t, someone with his history couldn’t live with himself. And if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be so compelling to the Australians who instinctively agree with his views, and whose instincts he so grotesquely reinforces.

 

I think the government is in a state of psychological siege. They complain that the boat people are trading on our decency. They have responded by losing it. This is impossible to accept, so they pretend we are still decent by saying that the boat people are not human, and therefore our decency is not engaged. So a lip sewing episode is portrayed as an insult to us – we who have human feelings, not an act of desperation by them – who have none. We are now seeing a leakage of this mindset to demonise those who support the refugees cause. Now we too are unAustralian, etc etc.

 

This leakage is also infecting the official attitude towards the fate of David Hicks. He too, has lost his rights as an Australian citizen, as have all the Taliban fighters captured during the war in Afghanistan. He is not one of us because what he did was not decent. It’s strange, isn’t it, that people fleeing the Taliban regime are detained in similar, disgusting conditions as those who fought for them! Just what are we proving to ourselves here? And how much further can this infection go before we realise we’re becoming no different to the enemy we just conquered?

 

Today, more reflections on Pauline Hanson’s legacy from Tim Dymond, Barry Rutherford, Peter Woodforde, John Passant, Malcolm Street and Paul Walter.

 

Tim Dymond in Perth

 

A `don’t speak ill of the politically dead’ style of political correctness seems to have infected commentary about Pauline Hanson’s retirement. Everybody has to mention how she `shook up the politicians’, `spoke for the unrepresented’ and `encouraged straight talking’ etc. Well in the spirit of straight talking – I’m glad she is gone because she is a racist! Yes that’s right, a R-A-C-I-S-T – RACIST!!

 

Do people remember what a racist is anymore? Someone who considers people’s ethnic background, skin colour, nationality to be their principle defining drawback! Hence the main issue with `Asian crime gangs’ is Asian-ness rather than crime; the `Aboriginal industry’ becomes more important than the ‘Rich White Man’s industry’ that runs Australia. We are now free to insult migrants for their supposed failure to measure up to some nebulous standard of `social cohesion’ that Anglo-Celtic Australians apparently achieve by simply being Anglo-Celtic. Don’t take my word for it – Pauline Hanson herself said it all in 1996 when she promised NOT to represent her Aboriginal constituents.

 

But the scandal of Hanson is the enormous confidence trick she pulled on her beloved ordinary Australians – aided and abetted by the media. She performed a great service for Australia’s elites – by which I mean the people who actually run the economy and political system, as opposed to academics and Amnesty International members. She encouraged people to believe that the poorest, most vulnerable members of the community are responsible for their problems – not the richest and most powerful.

 

All of the points Hanson made about Australia’s unrepresentative democracy and corrosive economic policies could have been made without rancour towards Aborigines and Asians. Her criticism of globalization was opportunistically taken up when her original message became stale.

 

There is nothing to be thankful for about her career. As her media cheer squad liked to say – Good riddance to bad rubbish!

 

***

 

Barry Rutherford

 

The Hanson legacy is an interesting one. I like the analogy created of the box of Redhead matches, once kept in many an Aussie pocket to light a cig, a rolli, a pipe or even the gas stove. One of my enduring memories of Melbourne in the 70s was the large redhead icon on a giant poster on one of the chimneys in Punt Road, Richmond. I feel that Hanson set fire to the political landscape especially in the bush. The burning of the greenery laid bare the raw basic emotion of people – especially in the bush – who had suffered in the early 90s from bank foreclosures, low commodity prices, the wool stockpile and high interest rates as those in the cities went high tech and talked about value adding.

 

Hanson short simplistic sentences became soothing to the ears of those tired with revolutionary change to the social and economic landscape as espoused by the republican Keating, who seemed only to listen to Mahler.

 

The sophistication of Keating became alien to thousands of country cockies as he strutted the south-east Asian stage talking intensely about the need to integrate with Asia. Banks were foreclosing on farms, interest rates were at record high levels and unemployment was high whilst Keating appeared to pander to the chardonnay or `fume-blanc’ artistic set of the eastern suburbs of Sydney.

 

Whilst Keating was collecting his clocks and Glover prints time was ticking for a bushfire to break out. Along came a redhead with a simple strike the bushfire was lit on the political landscape. National Party figures who cow-towed to the Liberal’s policies became some of her casualties.

 

Howard played clever politics and realised that some of his policies post-Keating had got the bush off side with his Government too, notably gun control. So Howard adopted some of the ideas of Hanson dressed up in a different wa, such as the treatment of asylum seekers and attacking ATSIC through the then Aboriginal Affairs minister John Herron.

 

Well the bushfire has been through. Italian suits, coiffure hair and a Gucci toothbrush are considered no longer necessary to perform well in politics. I suspect the shrubs and bushes will grow over Hanson’s legacy but I’m sure the charcoal remains will remain around for a long time.

 

MARGO: Your analogy reminds me of a bloke I met on the Hanson trail in 1998 at the Linville country races in western Queensland. I asked Anton Myck, cabinet maker, why he supported Pauline Hanson. “I call her the red head match you know, and I voted for her to set the country on fire.” Why did he want to torch Australia? “We’ve been in a stalemate for twenty years.”

 

***

 

Peter Woodforde in Melba, Canberra

 

After the Hanson brow-beating, a little bit of breast-beating Margo? It goes a long way, but no representative of the bourgeois media in Australia has come up with much in the way of a conclusion about why so many Australian battlers have steadfastly stayed clear of Howardism-Hansonism in droves that vastly outnumber the One Nation protest vote.

 

The bourgeois media, like the right wing media, love to infer endlessly that these people simply don’t exist or that any who do are just mugs for voting for the Australian Labor Party. They adore the term “rusted-on” as a pejorative of this kind of Left voter. Pushers of that kind of tosh have always found it perfectly acceptable to run a pair of contradictory lines and such cant was an essential plank in Howard’s election-winning platform. Howard himself used it as frequently as the soft centre, so with that kind of consensus, it must be true, mustn’t it?.

 

Yes, those battlers are mugs, but they are at least not wishful-thinking racists, or slothful wannabes with a drooling regard for market ideology. They have been long insulted by an army of commentators from the soft centre and from the right, but persist in voting for a large, extremely imperfect social democrat-democratic socialist coalition. They get duds like Con Sciacca, Graeme Campbell, Mark Latham, Ros Kelly, Michael Knight, Graham Richardson, David Bedall, Keith Wright, Brian Burke, John Reeves QC, John Dawkins, Andrew Theophanous and others ad nauseam, but still they persist. Why, Margo?

 

Because they also get a lot of good people with good policy objectives And once in a while, the battlers get lucky. Good people put in hard yards and phenomenon like Medicare start putting down roots, despite the hysteria of the hard Right. Honest toilers knock holes in the institutional tax scams of the wealthy. Political prisoners get let out of jail. People on lower incomes get a bite at better education for their kids.

 

The people who work for these things and vote for them are generally not listened to much by the ruling classes. One Hanson voter is worth a thousand “rusted-on” democratic socialists, after all. So you tell us, Margo – why are their views, their ways of life, their aspirations, so un-newsworthy, and so undervalued? The simple answer is that unlike almost all One Nation or Coalition voters, they are overwhelmingly dead-set battlers. There are plenty of middle-class Labor voters, Margo, but go and look at the booth-by-booth results for the last election. Then look at the relevant ABS statistics. Then join the bloody dots. Lots of poor people, lots of ALP votes. Even Lynton Crosby can work that one out.

 

Many low income Australians have little economic clout, but have enough nous not to fritter their small political capital for snake-oil. A Liberal Party member some time ago at a conference in Melbourne alluded to this with a complaint about policies for the type of people “who vote Labor anyway.”

 

Such voters were not and are not seduced by Hanson’s style, not “because it was the very antithesis of standard political discourse and rules of engagement” (what rot, Margo!), but for the same reasons that they also reject Howard, those cute li’l ol’ bucketloads of extinguished Nationals, the GST Democrats (how unfashionable it is now to speak ill of that new tax holiday for the rich) or such people as the Queensland Greens’ comic Drew Demidenko-Hutton and pals. None of these people ever gave a toss for low-income people who know the value of things like Medicare, a public health system, decent state schools and where it all comes from. Many soft centres don’t even understand those things, let alone support them, but like Howard, they will put in heaps of propaganda to pretend. Their efforts are lost on a vast number of Australians whose views don’t count, but who know ruling class bullshit when they see it.

 

As for believing that One Nation voters contain only a “hard-core five percent of hard-Right One Nation voters”, it may be comforting, but it is a little bit like believing in other hard-Right political myths. For example, in the ACT, Thatcherite conservative and would-be populist Kate Carnell draped a few scrubby “social-Left” tatters over herself to play fish-for-votes. She conned some soft-centres easily with this pap. Even when the wheels were falling off her Bjelke-like machine, her media/business fan club zealously kept intoning “dynamic” “good little manager” “compassionate” and even, God help us, “social-Left”. It got blatant. At the peak of Carnell’s success, a rotund local commentator was so full of hard-right gammon and bourgeois hubris that he referred to her ALP opponent as a “discarded blue singlet thrown in the back of a fire station.”

 

It wasn’t much in the end, but it got her over the line (thanks to a dodgy variable multi-member electorate system, Carnell was bumped into power and maintained by a gaggle of proto-Hansonite right-wingers, one of whom actually gained a ministry in her government – the others settled for very big cars). Unfortunately, when push comes to shove, right-wing populists, whether Bjelke (Hanson’s hero), Carnell or Hanson herself, vote for or impose hard right, battler-punishing policies and regimes. Spouting hypocrisy about the pros and cons of heroin-injecting room trials appears never to have delivered an injecting room in the ACT, but it allowed a hard right regime to slash public housing, blow up public health systems and implode public education.

 

There are many battlers who vote as Left as they practicably can. On very few occasions they vote Lefter than the ALP, but it’s infrequent. They frighten the soft centres and the hard Right with their patience. They are not into pie-in-the-sky, whether from the blandishments of Howardism-Hansonism or from the middle class Jeromian liberal-Fabianism. And despite their numbers, they don’t much suit the marketing demands of either the bourgeois media or the loony Right tabloid-talkback-TV agglomerate. But they persist and they will overcome.

 

***

 

John Passant

 

I think Hanson’s departure can be explained at a number of levels. The first point is that Hanson has departed, not Hansonism. So while it may be true to say that Howard attracted former Hanson voters, my understanding is that 500,000 still voted for her party in the last federal election. And Howard with his ecorat approach will not hold all the Hansonites forever. So the explanation that Howard captured the Hanson vote, while to some extent true, is too simplistic and needs elaboration.

 

Note too that the organisation has three parliamentarians in WA, a strong base from which to organise. Perhaps what we are witnessing is a political polishing of Hansonism and that meant getting rid of Hanson.

 

I’ve always thought that One Nation was an embryonic fascist organisation. By this I mean it had the capacity to develop in a fascist direction, not that it was fascist. Hanson was not covertly or overtly fascist. However the social background of the leadership and its appeal to particular sectors of society are alarmingly similar to the Nazis in the late 20s and early 30s last century.

 

Fascism is a middle class response to economic crisis. The petit bourgeois – small shop keepers, layers, real estate agents, managers and the like – feel caught between big business and big unions – i.e. between capital and labour. In their impotence they rage against both.

 

However as the economic crisis deepens the employing class sees in the fascists the battering ram to smash the organised sections of the working class – the trade unions and the parties of labour, be they social democratic or more left wing. This will enable the Nazis to produce more profit for the bosses by driving down wages and conditions. At the same time the fascists appeal to the less class conscious sections of the working class – the regional areas with low unionisation rates (and in Germany in 1930 and 1932, protestant areas) – by talking about making life better for them.

 

Once the crisis, expressing itself in Germany in a crisis of profitability, appears insoluble according to ordinary democratic means, the ruling class turns to the Nazis.

 

Now One Nation does attempt to appeal to the petit bourgeois. Its leader was the archetypal fish and chip owner. It also appeals to less class conscious workers with economic nonsense.

 

But while there are disaffected workers and middle class people by the millions out there, there is not as yet a crisis of profitability in Australia so severe that the ruling class needs to turn to One Nation to smash the ALP and the trade unions.

 

One Nation harnessed the disaffected middle class and some workers. But it cannot push past its present barrier (of around 5 to 10 per cent support.) The ruling class has no interest in the party.

 

It is thus a party of action when there is no action necessary. This frustration has expressed itself in Hanson’s case in her resignation. But the Party still exists and if the economic situation worsens there could be a resurgence in support for it, with the possibility, depending on the level of crisis, of support from the ruling class.

 

If so, I would think Hanson herself would come out of retirement.

 

***

 

Malcolm Street in Fraser, Canberra

 

I was interested in the interview you did last week on Canberra ABC radio regarding the fallout from the Hanson phenomenon. I recalled a political science theory some time ago that one function of third parties in Australian politics is to act as “transition parties”, which ease the movement of voters from one side of politics to the other. Thus the DLP eased the movement of Labour voters to the Coalition, the Democrats the opposite, and One Nation would be another DLP.

 

A couple of observations I’d like to make on specific points you raised in the broadcast:

 

1. The likelihood of a brain drain

 

You said that one problem with fighting back was that those upset about this election result could move overseas while that option was not open to One Nation supporters. Leaving Oz is by no means hypothetical; the week before the election we were talking to some friends (he an officer in the armed forces, she a lawyer) about whether we should stay here if Howard got back in on his platform and he said, “That’s interesting, we’ve had three other conversations [with other friends] like that this week…”! I’d argue that the critical differences are not in money but in motivation and available destinations.

 

One Nation was not just a party for battlers. Pauline herself was a business owner who had a property outside town, a son at Ipswich Grammar and, I understand, a Mercedes. The two David’s weren’t poor either… The party was able to get some very sharp operators on board; its many supporters included some of the dispossessed but there were plenty across the social spectrum who were only too happy to have their prejudices given a public imprimatur.

 

Of course there is greater motivation to stay at the One Nation end of the spectrum: if you don’t think Australia is sufficiently racist or far to the Right where do you go? Of the nations that can provide a Western standard of living, only the US appears to rival us for reactionary politics and international bloody-mindedness, and it ain’t an easy nation to get into. Plus we don’t have many migrants from the US who could easily go back there. So you’re stuck here if you want to make the last great stand for the white race (which I understand is a motivation of a proportion of Perth’s far-from-poor expatriate British and South African communities).

 

Look at it from the global small-l liberal perspective, and things are quite different. Australia, always geographically isolated, is now ideologically isolated on a fringe right-wing limb, where just about anywhere in the developed world except the US offers more liberal social policies. The major opposition party isn’t interested in contesting this other than at the margins so there’s no hope via the political system, unlike the situation in Austria or Denmark.

 

We are at risk of becoming a new international pariah, which makes a purely Australian career path less desirable. In addition, it is easier to get into the EU or Canada for work (and much easier in the case of NZ) than into the US, and we have many migrants who have ancestral privileges making it easier to go there (eg patrial status for those with British or Irish grandparents). The fact that such people have a more global perspective anyway will also make them more likely to look outside Australia.

 

That said, there are some very practical forces stopping people from going. Take my partner and I. Firstly, all three of my step-children and step-grandchildren live close by in Canberra. Secondly, we are in a defacto relationship which is not recognised by UK law, so despite my partner being British I would not be able to work in the EU without a special permit (as I had from 1980 to 1982) as my last ancestor born in the UK (and for that matter outside Australia) was three generations ago and I thus can’t get patrial status. Thirdly, the dirty little secret of Howard’s economic miracle is that its price has been the $A going through the floor. My partner, who recently retired, is on a pension that is very comfortable for Australia, but would be a pittance virtually everywhere else. We came to the conclusion that New Zealand was the only practical alternative if we did move.

 

As an aside, given that it has been through both a period of institutionalised boorishness and isolationism (Muldoon) and a lunatic free-market experiment (Rogernomics enhanced by the subsequent National government) New Zealand has already undergone what we are experiencing in even more extreme forms over a longer period, and could well evolve into a pointer to a possible means of recovery and healing here. NZ could become a “local” haven for disaffected liberal Australians the way South Australia was in the 60’s under Dunstan.

 

2. Undoing what has been done “since the 70s”

 

In the radio broadcast and at other times you have indicated that the Howard government has undone the legacy of the Whitlam years. I’m afraid it’s far worse than that…

 

Whitlam’s inheritance is long gone under this government; it is *Chifley’s* record that is now being systematically destroyed. That extraordinary government in its all too short term set the trajectory for Australia for fifty years; massive immigration including refugees from the war, breaking the bounds of an Anglo-Celtic ethnic structure, an independent, activist role in international politics and the UN out of all proportion to our size, expansion of higher education and a major government role in providing the infrastructure of this widely-dispersed nation. All with a conservative, fearful and isolated nation exhausted from the war.

 

These trends continued under Menzies, despite his Anglophilia, and in some areas were even enhanced (remember the Colombo Plan, a pioneering part of Australian interaction with the region?). The arrival of Asian migrants was no more a change than that of the southern Europeans in the 1950s, and under Malcolm Fraser our attitude to refugees and international affairs remained a positive and humane one, a stance that was continued in the Hawke-Keating years.

 

Under Howard we have instead seen a deliberate scare campaign against refugees (aka asylum seekers) and anyone of an unusual ethnicity, a new isolationism and proudly acting as Uncle Sam’s “deputy sheriff”, a continued assault on public education at all levels and a decimation of our tertiary sector, and a “hands-off” policy to national development.

 

We are not back in the fifties, we are back in the 30s, the days of Bruce and Lyons…

 

Hands off the economy whatever the suffering that is occurring, with due obeisance to our imperial masters (US instead of UK) so they will help us militarily if we get into trouble (just like the UK did in World War II…).

 

Back to being a colony.

 

***

 

Paul Walter in Adelaide

 

I got round to reading your “ripping yarn” come Kafkaesque hallucination of a book over the weekend.. I am glad I haven’t read it earlier OR left the reading of it until any later. It’s like getting the other half of a torn road map; so I am now getting a well-rounded picture in my mind as I remember back to what seems such an eternity ago, and personal responses to incidents I can recall from that time.

 

I remembered thinking the youngsters were risking making a martyr of her, for instance. I remembered the “”I don’t like it”, the “please explain”and the other fun poked at her.(Well, she wanted to play grown-up games; she was inevitably going to be left to “cop it sweet” from battalions of well educated and well-rounded minds outside of her deep-north comfort zone.

 

You did well to remind readers of the hard grind of a not-necessarily-privileged background. I remembered becoming nauseated eventually with the constant carping about her vocation as a fish-and chip shop owner-worker and the infantile snotty snobbery that that sort of commenting revealed. So she worked for a living in the real world in a hot sweaty fish and chip shop! Would anyone who has ever had to work hard or battle a bit have found that “funny”?

 

Yes, she deserved to be “fronted”; but that wasn’t the way to “front” her, nor was personal abuse to her face. Some of the other characters in your book later revealed how the use of much more subtle tactics could really expose her real weakness to the light of day. I remembered thinking, for example, about her squawking in the Queensland court about being “hurt” by the rough satirising she was receiving and thinking she had a cheek after some of the brutal stuff her and her people had dished out to young people and those perpetual blue-collar battlers, the Aborigines.

 

I found myself by degrees admiring, astonished and appalled at her capacity to absorb punishment, her sheer ignorance of historical fact and her apparent lack of any self-reflexivity.

 

Very ugly was the feud between you and “Mouldfield” – a disturbing glance into what constituted the locus for a frightening aspect of the wider collective Australian (unconscious) personalty as represented through him. Nasty!

 

Frightening also when an onlooker realises that Oldfield is there as representative of Howard, the Media barons and the anonymous collective of the controlling classes.I recall reading French philosopher Roland Barthe’s comment to the effect that…”The bourgeoisie always obscures itself”… in “Mythologies”, a work that was trying to grasp how the crazy governing impulses of life in a “modern” society are incessantly reproduced; in effect a conceptualising of HOW the mechanism of ideology interactive with socialisation in effect REPRODUCES US!

 

And maybe Hanson DID prove capable of learning, in some respects, from events, too. Coming from way out of the blue she single-handedly almost brought about the downfall of the entire Howard apparatus last year.The casualty list she inflicted on orthodox political careers alone is awesome, and but for the taking-over of outside events there could well and truly have been a real, if indirect,”Revenge of the Mainstream” , with a vengeance, against the now entrenched economic rationalist regimes that have control here in our time.

 

But Hanson is now “Damned with Faint Praise”…

 

Her political end shows the difference between the spontaneous rebellion of

a Pugachev or, say, a William Wallace or Boadiccea nature, and the hope of success in challenging the paradigm forearmed with coherently reasoned facts and ideas and presentable alternatives offering a vision and choice related to the present moving into the future, rather than just passion. And I personally believe the REAL threats to Global and Australian democracy are as well and truly entrenched as ever.